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ANN ARBOR — NovoDynamics, a developer of pattern recognition and analytics software, and Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina announced that NovoDynamics NovoVerus software will be used in the digitization process for more than 800,000 Egyptian newspaper clippings that have been collected since 1976 by the Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation Economiques, Juridiques et Sociales (in English, the Center for Economic, Legal and Social Studies and Documentation).

The organization is an affiliate of the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique — again, in English, the French National Scientific Research Center.

The primary objective of the collaborative endeavor between the BA and the CEDEJ is to make this rare collection accessible to the public in a searchable online archive. Once digitized, the articles can be preserved indefinitely in perfect condition, indexed for online search and made available internationally.

NovoVerus was selected for this massive digitization initiative given its comprehensive support for Middle Eastern languages and its superior optical character recognition accuracy, especially when it comes to degraded text quality. The automated image enhancement capabilities built into NovoVerus will facilitate the processing of aging newsprint clippings, many of which are yellowed, damaged or otherwise degraded.

“The BA is well-known for its leadership in the digital handling of Arabic text, and NovoVerus has been a reliable choice when it comes to ambitious OCR undertakings, demonstrating high performance on images scanned from challenging, degraded originals with poor text quality,” said Bibliotheca Alexandrina Senior Digital Production Engineer Rami K. Rouchdi.

NovoDynamics President and CEO David Rock added, “We are proud to be supporting this important international effort with our flagship product, NovoVerus. Our new release enables faster processing, increased accuracy, a significant reduction in memory usage and a host of other enhancements that combine to make NovoVerus 4.0 the industry leading global language
OCR solution.”

The new Library of Alexandria, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, was inaugurated in October 2002. The Library endeavors to recapture the spirit of openness of the ancient Library, engaging global audiences through the technological innovations of the digital age. It is much more than a library of books; rather, it is a vast complex providing science, research, art, history, technology and dialogue through a single hub located on the Mediterranean shore. For more information, visit www.bibalex.org.

NovoDynamics was funded by In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the American intelligence community.